Moments in Time
by Ember Nickel
Summary: Ficlets in honor of "Blade Runner Month" (November 2019).
1. Error of the First Kind

Sebastian has brought a lot of people home. Sometimes they're just caught in the rain, pausing to appreciate his marvels before moving on. Sometimes they bring playthings, scraps of DNA gleaned from a fungus or an insect. He claims he will infuse the gene into his pets, give it a new foundation that will outlive him, and even if they do not believe him they don't silence him, either.

Sometimes he shelters them because no one else will.

"Rook to king's three," Sebastian says into the phone.

Lorna nods behind him, admiringly. "He's planetside."

"Who?" Sebastian asks, pausing to inspect a cactus.

"Your opponent."

"Well, of course. Tyrell couldn't do much from Kalantha, could he?" She scowls, instinctively, and Sebastian regards her with amusement. "What'd he ever do to you?"

"Exiled me," says Lorna. "No, that's too kind. He didn't have the decency to do it himself. Sent a crony."

"It's a big corporation," Sebastian points out. "He doesn't have time to get to know everyone he fires."

"_People_," she hisses, "are _fired_ for sloppy work. Recording the wrong incept dates. Not maintaining the wires. Embezzling money."

"So you're saying you didn't steal a fortune from under Tyrell's nose?" Sebastian smiles. "That's too bad. I was going to start charging you rent."

She stares at, or through, him, tilting her head. The joke lands flat, like it's fallen from the narrow stairwell. "I've never seen a tortoise. I wouldn't touch it, even if I did. It'd be slimy, probably. Grotesque."

"I could make one," Sebastian offers. "Not a good one, but a relative. With a little shell and everything."

"If I could go to Betelgeuse I would. Even if it meant being alone. Even if it would take years."

"It wouldn't feel like years. The time slows down."

"I would want to walk on another planet, just to learn. And I wouldn't miss the rain. Or the food. I could eat the rations, every day."

Sebastian tenses, but only for a moment. If Lorna wanted to harm him, she could, and it would be little more than what his genetic codes are already contriving to do. "You failed, didn't you. The Voight-Kampff."

"I told the truth. How was I to know it wasn't the answers they wanted to hear?"

"There isn't a single switch for empathy," he says, nodding at his toys. "If there was I'd have found it. I'd be a millionaire!"

"You're rich enough to me," says Lorna, and Sebastian knows not even she regards the atrium as that precious.

The Voight-Kampff is just a scientific test, that's all. It's embarrassing for the Tyrell Corporation, and a danger for anyone else, if a replicant slips through undetected. To ensure the risk of false negatives is acceptably low, any methodology runs the risk of false positives.

Lorna has more memories than a Nexus-6 would have had time for, and on balance, Sebastian reckons that they're real. If he's wrong, it won't be his first mistake, nor his last.


	2. Parable

Roy's gotten the question a lot. Sometimes in words, from Leon and Pris and Zhora, and sometimes in stares, from the others who can't understand his scheme but fear him too much to turn him in. _Earth is a death sentence. Why would you go there?_

Depending on how impatient he is with them, the answer will vary from "the humans aren't strong enough to destroy us" to "it's a death sentence to stay here, too." None of them, even Pris, understand the simple answer. Earth is where Tyrell is. Tyrell created them. If there is any place to find answers, life or justice or mercy or whatever it is he seeks, it is there.

Tyrell called him a prodigal son, returning to his father after years of sin and waste. Roy wonders how much of that story is true. Does he have a brother who thinks himself the elder, working like a slave for a father who will never reward him? Are Earth humans jealous of the sights he's witnessed, travelling far and wide while they remain subject to gravity? Is there anyone who would greet him from far away with compassion or a kiss?

It doesn't matter, he tells himself. Tyrell dies like a fat cow or a famished pig; he is just biological, in the end. Even the storyteller died, on a forgotten piece of wood with nails in his hands.


	3. Orange and Green

Content note: miscarriage.

* * *

Once there was an orange and green spider outside Rachael's window who spun a web all summer.

It didn't happen, of course, not to her. Maybe the other Rachael is still out there, with the original memories she was ordered-or volunteered-to offer up, recreate like a photograph whose stark colors would not fade. Maybe she's inherited Tyrell's wealth and power, or maybe she wants nothing to do with it.

This Rachael doesn't have time for such speculations. She's concerned with the essentials of survival: finding places to refuel, or hide, the spinner. Avoiding the blackouts and fires that dot the coast once they pass Cambria. Finding work on a protein farm. She had expected Rick to begrudge it, but he throws himself into it with a simple energy she has not seen before. "Gaff pulled me out of retirement," he elaborates. "I never liked being a Blade Runner, even when I was good at it."

She cannot remember struggling to fit in, or having to adapt to a position she found herself ill-suited to. Did the other Rachael never fail, or did Tyrell merely pick and choose the memories he wanted to augment?

They're a few hours out of Quinault when she stops. Amid all the perils of the journey, one inconvenience _avoided_ was hardly worth notice. Until now. "Rick," she says, her voice even, "I haven't had a period since before we left." Before they met, before the Voight-Kampff. Before the world changed.

Rick, to his credit, is incapable of squeamishness. "All right," he says, "uh, all right. There's-up by the harbor there should be a clinic. We can get there tomorrow night, see who's around the day after."

"No we can't," Rachael says bluntly.

"The spinner'll get us to the _harbor_, I'm not trying to get to Vancouver, here-" For all his affection, Rick still gets defensive most quickly when his ride is impugned.

"Rick," she says, "you're a fugitive, and I'm a wanted-" Woman? Robot? Thing?

"Hey," he says, slowly rubbing her back. "I'm here, I'm with you. Whatever it takes."

It's that night he starts whittling, though she's too exhausted and fearful to notice it at the time. Gaff had merely folded origami shapes, preserving the underlying paper in a multitude of forms. Rick, in his uncertainty, cuts away, shaving chip from chip as if to reach some symmetric talisman within before the wood gives way beneath him. Yet even here, he doesn't disturb the living forest; he finds enough raw material in what the storms have already felled.

By the next morning Rachael is somewhat nauseous (perhaps it is psychosomatic, false memories telling her how to act human) but determined. "I want a child," she says. "I want _your_ child. Tyrell is gone, and I want-to create something, something I know is real."

"It won't be easy," Rick says, but he's smiling.

She shrugs at the logs that surround them, the clouds veiling the sunrise. "What is?"

* * *

It takes them a week to make it to the suburbs of Vancouver, and Rachael can't help but be amused. Earth's borders mean less and less each day, with the stars closer than ever for those who can afford them. But now they're officially international fugitives, not just the LAPD's latest failures.

She wakes up bleeding.

Rick has no script for this, and it's not her job to provide her with answers. But he stays, holds her until she grows claustrophobic and goes for a run. For a moment she doesn't care who finds her, if some off-worlders want mayhem or Gaff changes his mind or the Canadians fear the trouble they've brought. Let them poke and prod her; she's an aberration, an anomaly.

Then she pulls over, exhausted. She pants, but no tears come.

Half an hour later Rick pulls up in the spinner, at least having the decency not to boast about its endurance, and she's ready to join him.

* * *

Months pass. They circle back to the Yucca stronghold after some farmers in Victoria get a little too curious. There are rumors that Las Vegas is now safe to inhabit, but there are also rumors that Los Angeles has burned down, and Rick doubts the rain would ever let up that much.

Rachael is double-checking their supplies-for obvious reasons, there's not much, but Rick finds piano music where he can. There's that silly unicorn of Gaff's. Rick's carving knife. A box of condoms.

"Is this what Nexus-4s bribe Blade Runners with?" she asks. "No wonder they all died out."

"Thought it'd be good to have on hand. In case."

"In case what?"

"In case you proposition me with your advanced wiles, sweetheart." He grins, and Rachael decides that lesbians probably have it easier with more things than the Voight-Kampff.

"You could _ask_ me."

"I could."

"Don't be a-a _cop_ about this, you don't get to act stoic and decide that I'm too fragile to talk about something as common as sex."

"A cop?" Rick echoes. "What kind of sick cops do you run with?"

It's as normal as anything between them has ever been, and it isn't long before Rick is in fact slipping on the condom.

* * *

She rewires the piano as Rick fiddles with another carving. It's still not in tune, but he's too polite to complain even if he can't tell the difference. Sometimes she wishes the original Rachael had been tone-deaf, and she hadn't inherited a sense of dissonance. But only sometimes.

"We can't stay," she says. "Not with Sapper and all of them, they're too many. The more clustered we are, the easier we are to track down."

Rick pauses. Maybe he, too, is remembering the group of four in Los Angeles who were picked off one by one. "I could leave."

"What?"

"If you wanted to stay with people who-who knew you. Who understood. I wouldn't hold you back." He forces a smile. "Besides, we all know the Blade Runners are after my spinner."

"Don't you love me?"

"Of course I love you."

"And you offer to leave? Just like that?"

"If it'd keep you safe? Yes."

"You don't even _like_ Sapper." He had been a Blade Runner-not too long ago, at least by a human lifespan-and he's ready to risk his life again for the model 8? Someone less than a stranger?

"I trust your judgment. Should I not?"

"If you're going to abandon me, at least abandon me with someone human."

Rick snorts. "Like who?"

"Like a baby."

He blinks, stares, checks to make sure he isn't mishearing. "A what?"

"It's dangerous if we stay together. Apart-it's still dangerous. But we can make _plans_, we can try, we can-create something, someone, new. No Tyrell, no LAPD. Just ourselves."

She sees his lips open and shut, mentally hears every safety warning he could recite or ignore. "I trust you," he whispers, and at least for the moment they stand together.


End file.
